EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES | BDO LLP
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15 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES | BDO LLP
And, as life sciences manufacturers ramp up their capital investment in new production equipment and facilities to start producing COVID-19-related treatments, ‘the need to increase local manufacturing capacity to mitigate pandemic-related logistics disruptions will drive an increased need to properly test and configure new equipment in new facilities.’ Factory acceptance testing of such kit, once done on- site at the manufacturer by customer specialists, now needs to be done remotely: ‘With today’s travel restrictions, manufacturers are moving to virtual factory acceptance tests using video links, virtual documentation, and even AR & VR technologies. These virtual factory acceptance tests will need to provide not only for rapid, seamless execution of the tests, but also for the associated workflows, audit, and verification procedures that ultimately assure regulatory compliance.’
Q2. And since 2014, EdTech companies in the UK have raised a total of $857m in venture funding, comprising 41% of all European EdTech investment in 2019. Emerging ways of working post- COVID- 19will throw up many new use cases for VR/AR. Two such opportunities in the pharma space are remote production support and remote acceptance testing, write Pari Sanghavi and Jim Lehane . With some manufacturers reducing on- site support staff by as much as 75%, the authors write, ‘properly configuring and managing equipment, as well as verifying correct manufacturing processes, with only critical workers on-site, requires increased use of video conferencing, as well as artificial reality and virtual reality (AR & VR). Critical workers such as hands- on technical staff, are being trained to undertake verification and data gathering tasks differently to allow strictly clerical employees to work remotely.’
technology is in staff training of all kinds, for example in the fields of military, retail, aviation, logistics, manufacturing and medicine . ‘Companies such as Walmart, Boeing, UPS, and others are using AR VR for training purposes, which has been driving the demand for VR AR content creation in recent years,’ reports MarketWatch . It cites Boeing, which reported a reduction in operational time of 25% by using AR headsets, with associated gains in productivity by reducing errors in maintenance. Meanwhile Agco, the US agriculture manufacturer, reported a reduction of 30% in inspection times through the use of AR in training programs. Immersive technologies are a growing area of EdTech, which is a hot area for investors right now, with some promising funding and exit opportunities. Globally, EdTech companies saw VC investment grow by 22% in Q1 2020 – a rate that is expected to have grown even more in
VR also lends itself to entertainment and is already well-known in the gaming sphere for enabling truly immersive, first-person perspectives throughout gameplay. In sports, 360-degree cameras can be used to capture and stream sporting events so that fans experience the game as though they were in the stadium. NextVR, one of the early VR broadcasting start-ups, which provided VR coverage for sporting events as early as 2015, has now been acquired by Apple . The global VR/AR ecosystem was valued at $385.5 million in 2018, and is expected to grow at 18.5% over the next few years with increasing demand post- COVID-19, according to MarketWatch . The demand for AR/VR goes hand in hand with an increase in headset manufacturers such as Google, HTC and Oculus, and the growing availability of content to download via users’ smartphones. But the key application of AR/VR
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